Sister duo, The New Victorians have recently released their Maltese debut single ‘Min Jaf’, featuring local rapper Lapes, with the song forming part of their upcoming Collaborations EP, a project that was conceived and brought to fruition in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We sat down with the two artists to talk more about the plans and aspirations behind their latest endeavour. 

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has thrown the world into turmoil, and the music and entertainment industries, with their dependence on large crowds and the free movement of people, have been particularly badly hit as a result of the preventive measures and restrictions that have been put in place around the globe. Concerts, gigs, and events have been routinely cancelled or postponed, leaving many artists stuck in their homes, devoid of the inspiration or motivation to create new music. 

Sister duo, The New Victorians have recently released their Maltese debut single ‘Min Jaf’, featuring local rapper Lapes, with the song forming part of their upcoming Collaborations EP, a project that was conceived and brought to fruition in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We sat down with the two artists to talk more about the plans and aspirations behind their latest endeavour. 

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has thrown the world into turmoil, and the music and entertainment industries, with their dependence on large crowds and the free movement of people, have been particularly badly hit as a result of the preventive measures and restrictions that have been put in place around the globe. Concerts, gigs, and events have been routinely cancelled or postponed, leaving many artists stuck in their homes, devoid of the inspiration or motivation to create new music. 

In turning this ambitious concept into a reality, The New Victorians were aided by a number of organisations and entities, including the European Foundation for Support of Culture and its president, Konstantin Ishkhanov, who reaffirmed their dedication to supporting and promoting culture in all its shapes and forms, as well as towards providing further opportunities for talented local artists. 

We sat down with The New Victorians ahead of their EP launch to talk about their musical journey as a band, the impact of Covid-19 on their plans and aspirations, and the experience they have undergone from their work on their latest project. 

Can you tell us a bit about the roots of your band, how the New Victorians as a concept came into being?

We’ve always played together as sisters at home, but it was always for fun, not professionally. The first ‘proper’ thing we did was play at our cousin’s wedding together and everyone was impressed and told us that we should do this properly, and then that same month we had applied for a song-writing competition we found on Twitter. There were cool judges on it, like the guitarist from Evanescence, and American Idol winner Kris Allen, and they promised to hear every song, so we thought there was nothing to lose – there wasn’t even an application fee or anything. So for the first time ever we bought ‘Sound Recording for Dummies’, recorded our own demo at home in a week, and sent over the song. A week later, we got an email saying that they wanted us to come to America to be in the final, and long story short, we ended up going and winning. 

When we came back there was obviously a lot of hype, and we got introduced to Howard Keith Debono which is where everything was born really. At the time we were called ‘Phyllis & Bertie’, and the first thing Howard told us was that if we wanted to take this seriously we needed to change the name! We started working with him towards our first album, and developing our own sound, going on photoshoots… all this was very new to us. 

Speaking of your name, where did a name like ‘The New Victorians’ come from?

At first we were just very much in need of a name, and were coming up with all the options and writing them up in a list. And then our mother – she spends a lot of time working with youths and reads up on a lot of psychology books – she had read in one of the books that they are calling the new generation of innovators, the new Victorians, because it’s kind of an homage to creation and doing lots of new things with excellence. We thought it was perfect for us because the Victorian era was an age with a lot of change and we wanted to bring innovation to music, but we really also thought it sounded cool. So it was a bit of a win-win!

Your official biography states that the group was founded in 2011, which makes this year your 10-year anniversary. Have there been any particular highlights over the past 10 years that particularly stand out in your minds? Or any low points perhaps?

Ten years! It’s funny because we started out as students doing this part-time, and then there was a point where we both had full-time jobs, and then we were students again for a tine, and it’s really only been this past three years that we’ve properly managed to do this full-time. 

I would say that these past three years have been a highlight in themselves because we’ve managed to do this full-time and set up our own company and do things properly together. 

Some of the performances also stand out as high points of course – opening for Anastasia, taking an original show to the Edinburgh Fringe and giving over 50 performances with audiences who have no idea who we are, performing for the BBC Orchestra on the Granaries in Floriana, and with Rockestra when we were still really new on the block, all the music videos we managed to do….

I think the journey has changed along the way as we have. In the beginning it was almost our hobby when we were at university. We always knew we wanted to do it well, but it was done in our spare time. Then the more you have to commit to this kind of lifestyle the more you find yourself in at the deep end, which is scary, but we’ve also often found that when you don’t have a plan b you have to make that thing work. The opportunities have changed as we have with them, and as we grew and developed, the highlights have always been the risks we’ve taken with new creative challenges. Just last Christmas for instance, we did a Christmas chapel hop, where we went to different chapels and gave socially distanced performances. That act of finding a new creative challenge and seeing how we respond to it is always a highlight. 

Over these past years you’ve played and performed to both local and international audiences. What would you say is the contrast between the local and international music scenes, and audiences, if indeed you have noticed any difference at all?

Well abroad you obviously have to work harder to even find an audience. In Malta, sometimes you can practically fill a theatre easily with just family members and friends because we have such large families and everyone is so connected. So you definitely feel like you work harder for your audiences there. 

In terms of reception, we’ve been very lucky in how our work has been warmly received both locally and even abroad; it’s been appreciated in all of the spaces that we’ve gone through really. You do notice a difference in reception though, especially with productions like ‘MARA’. It’s a production where we were telling stories about different women using music, and there were some women that we may not know of locally but that are actually studied in the UK, which obviously affects audience engagement. 

Another main difference we’ve noticed is that Maltese audiences are quite used to enjoying a good standard of production for gigs and concerts for free, because of things like Beer Fest and the Marsovin Wine Festival, and even our festa culture. There’s basically a lot of free culture in Malta, which is a very nice thing of course, but can be equally tricky sometimes when you try to make an audience member commit to paying for your product. It can be a very challenging thing, although we’ve been quite lucky on that front honestly, since our audience tends to come on board quite quickly because the product is usually always different which makes them curious. International audiences don’t really present this issue at all. In places like the Edinburgh Fringe, for instance, you have totally random people purchasing tickets to our show without even knowing us at all. In Malta I think it’s very different. I feel like unless there’s a bit of familiarity we’re quite reluctant to put our money where our mouth is and venture to find new artists. 

And when audiences actually buy a ticket to see you, they’re usually also more attentive. The more we’ve grown the more we have come to appreciate when an audience wants to be there for what you want to give them and take their journey with them, rather than being there for the beer or some other event and just listening to you in the background. 

This past year has obviously been dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, and the music industry in particular has been one of the worst-hit sectors. What has been the impact of COVID-19 on your own projects? Have there been any cancelled events or initiatives perhaps, or have you used it as a time to try to branch out and come up with new concepts and ideas?

It hit us right in the face when it all broke out. We were about to premiere a brand-new original musical at the Manoel Theatre theatre. We had an original cast of musicians and actors who were all living here working together with TMYT (Teatru Manoel Youth Theatre), and it was an exciting thing for us because we were beginning to merge our international experience with the local scene and getting them to mingle under our direction, which was very cool. Then unfortunately after around 10 days of rehearsals we were stopped in our tracks. The show was set to premiere within two weeks but we had to cancel everything and send all the artists back home, which was a huge let-down because the show and all the songs were all written and ready. We also found ourselves losing the little extra income we get from weddings, with one wedding after another ending up cancelled or postponed, so in a sense our forecast for the year was suddenly all up in smoke. 

However, while Covid has certainly brought about different challenges, we’ve also tried to create different opportunities from it. We used the time to refocus, to decide just what we’re about, and I think we took it as a challenge really. We wrote like 40 songs, and thankfully there was also an Arts Council grant so we were just pitching ideas and thinking of what we can do with this time, and that’s where the idea for the Collaborations EP was born. We thought about what it would be like to not only showcase what is happening around us, but actually create new work in this new dynamic, with new collaborations on a virtual platform. We wanted to explore that concept, and in fact, the whole EP was done virtually, we hadn’t even met some of the artists before. 

So we ended up working on an album and doing a lot of online performances, and now ever since we’ve released ‘Min Jaf’, there’s already been a sense of palpable relief. The fact that we’ve actually managed to release some creativity into the world after a year of all this is already a big deal. After all, working on stuff on your own without getting to share it feels bizarre, especially when you create art for an audience and with the intention to share it. 

We’ve also used the time for a lot of planning that we will probably see the fruit of in 2022, because we have so many projects that we’re currently researching and preparing for, but no one knows when it’s going to be safe to start releasing them and trying to realise them. 

Focusing a bit on your current ongoing project – the Collaborations EP – can you tell us a bit more about the thought-process behind it, how you came up with the idea, and what it seeks to accomplish or explore as an EP? And how have you found the process of trying to create music, especially collaborative music, in the times of COVID, with the focus on the virtual?

Ultimately, it was a question of ‘can we create connection, even virtually, in a collaborative way?’ Can we connect enough to create in this time, because when you create you do need to know the person and have that kind of rapport, so it was kind of an experiment to see if that would work virtually and if the result would be equally good compared to if we had met in person. Equally we wanted the pandemic to inform the works itself, not just the process of their creation. The aesthetic of the ‘Min Jaf’ video for example, is just us trapped inside a blue room, which mirrors the writing process. 

With regard to the collaborations themselves, we found it takes longer when everything is virtual. When you’ve never met someone and you’re just on a video call, you’re potentially more cautious in your feedback because you don’t know how they’re taking it or how honest you can be. With some people you’re on the same page immediately – one email, one video call, and that’s it – with others you sometimes wonder if you’re fully understanding each other. So there’s a lot of to-and-froing, It was definitely a challenge, and it still is really because we’re still finishing off the other songs in the EP. But it is all just a bit slower because you can’t read the other person in the room. 

As the name implies, you’re collaborating with a variety of artists for this work. How did you go about choosing these particular five? And how did you find the experience of working with such a varied group of people who have such different styles? Did you find that it affected your own sound?

It was a very active choice to choose opposing artists. We didn’t want it to be wholly a rap album or a folk album. We wanted it to be informed by the artists we were collaborating with and we wanted to have a range of styles from Maltese RnB to folky Hungarian singing, to more alternative Maltese music, to straight-up pop, so we chose collaborators that had those different facets. They all had their different strengths, which varied from our own, and we sought to bring them all together. We wanted the different sides to merge, because otherwise we would have just sent them a song and asked them to sing on it, which we purposefully didn’t do. The creative challenge of bringing a bunch of styles and genres together and still get the EP to feel like a cohesive body of work was the really exciting aspect of the project.

At the same time, of course, we were also aware that it was our responsibility in a sense to have a bit of control over the songs, because we were the ones that had an overview of all the songs, which meant that certain decisions which we took were informed by the knowledge that if we do something with one song it would fit better with the rest. So, being in possession of that holistic overview, we felt it made sense to guide the other collaborations while allowing them to truly express their own creative voice. Even from the technical side, we mostly oversaw the project ourselves, not to prescribe the song or style, but to provide an anchor point to the artists involved. Essentially, we told them, ‘This is what we feel the skeleton could look like, and now you can flesh it out’. We found that it was important, and our responsibility as the leading artists to provide the five skeletons and let each of them go down their own rabbit hole.

This is not to say that it all went exactly as we had envisaged it. In some cases it does take a whole different turn to what we expected. With Graver, the London-based artist, for instance, we thought the track would be much more pop sounding, but his natural sound is very quirky – more of a new jazz style – and what he brought to the song makes you see it with fresh eyes and makes you respond to these changes. So it is a very ping-pong, to-and-fro affair, which in certain cases was more fun and seamless than in others. The end result is a set of very different songs, but we are very happy with that, and think that they gel together very well nonetheless thanks to that element of direction that was given.

You’re being supported by a number of organisations in this endeavour, in order to help being the project to fruition. What do think of the role such organisations and individuals have in supporting and promoting art, and their importance for local artists?

Organisations like the European Foundation for Support of Culture are invaluable, especially in times like these, when ticket sales are what they are, and it’s so difficult to create your own revenue. It’s so crucial for institutions like the Arts Council Malta and the EUFSC to keep the creation aspect of art alive. If we didn’t have the initial impulse of the Arts Council and then the help of the EUFSC to help us execute our idea, it wouldn’t have happened. You can have all the greatest ideas in the world but you need a basic level of capital to start making them a reality, and in this situation these organisations can give you that initial injection. As a springboard to kick off an artistic vision, this support is invaluable, and in a sense even beyond that, when you come to take your creation to the next level. With the Arts Council funding, for instance, we had enough to realise just the music, and that’s cool and exciting, but if you’re not going to have a cool visual to go with it, and enough money to boost that in different places, then it’s just going to get stuck, especially in the today’s saturated market. So other collaborations with local brands, and the European Foundation for Support of Culture coming on board enabled you to exploit the work that you’ve been making and spread it as far and wide as possible.

Looking beyond this EP, are there any other upcoming projects or plans that you have on the horizon, for the post-COVID age perhaps? 

There’s a ton of stuff in the works, although we can’t really reveal too much of it yet unfortunately. In our brains we have a plan of events stretching up to 2022 that we’re working on. We’re still working out many of the details of that, be it a more developed version of our Christmas chapel hop, or a follow-up to this EP in the form of a full album that will be a more immersive, interactive, and ambitious project, or even more theatre commissions which we’ve already gotten and are still researching. So there’s a full range of projects really, from theatre, to music, to a lot more creative events and experiences for our audiences. Of course, no one knows how the whole coronavirus situation will develop so for now what we’re doing is holding lightly to our plans, but planning anyway!